It's a best practice to use the Wdesk Styles guide on the Edit tab whenever possible. Styles apply uniform formatting to documents quickly, reducing time on individual formatting tasks.

Text Formatting in the Toolbar

The text formatting buttons are found on the Edit tab. These include options for adjusting font and style, alignment, and indentation

Using Symbols and Special Characters

Wdesk has a wide variety of special characters you can use in your documents, including currency signs, such as the Euro, British Pounds, and the Yen. The symbols for copyright and registered trademark are also located here.

On the Edit tab, click the Insert button, and select Symbol.

Click the Special Characters tab for some of the most commonly used characters and symbols. Click the character you want in your document, then click the Insert Symbol button.

Smart Quotes

You can set defaults for straight or curly punctuation in your documents for quotes, commas, apostrophes and semicolons. To change or convert punctuation defaults, go to the File tab, click the Properties button, and select Document Properties.

Then go to the Preferences tab and the Text Defaults sub-tab. Check the box for Use smart quotes, then Apply Changes.

Wdesk will go through the document and search for any use of quotes or affected punctuation and convert them to straight or curly as appropriate.

NOTE: Only a document owner can make this change. Also, this feature changes all punctuation in sections that are available to you to edit.

Check Spelling as You Type

The spell check as you type feature can be turned on and off for documents and workbooks separately. The ability to turn spell check off helps to avoid problems with abbreviations commonly used in the workbook, and with foreign languages that would trigger a misspelling indicator in documents.

Spell check is on by default in both documents and workbooks. On the File tab, click the Properties button, then select Document Properties. On the Advanced tab you'll see that Check spelling as you type is selected.

If you do not have Check spelling as you type on for your document and want to check for spelling errors, go to the Review tab and click the Spelling button.

Counting Words and Characters

In the lower right-hand corner of Wdesk, you will see a word and character counter. Select text in your document, and the number of words, characters, and spaces will display.

Format Painter

The Format Painter allows you to copy and paste the format of text and table cells for single and multiple selections. The Format Painter also works for text links.

Selecting the Format Painter button once will copy the format of any selected text or table cells and will apply this format to the next selected text or table cell. If there is no selection, the format at the cursor position will be copied. This is appropriate when you only need to apply the formatting to one additional selection.

You can also use the Format Painter for multiple selections. Place your cursor in a selection from which you'd like to copy the formatting. Double-click the Format Painter button to capture the format of selected text or table cells and apply this format to each subsequent selection of text or cells. You can turn off the Format Painter feature by clicking on Esc or on any other formatting icon.

You can also use Format Painter with multiple table cells. When multiple formats exist in different table cells, Format Painter will utilize all of the formats so that you can paint an entire table column in a single operation.

If you click once, you'll be able to format one column, but to do them all, double-click to activate the Format Painter to use it multiple times. Now you can click the letter at the top of each subsequent column and the formatting is applied.